Rufus Wilmot Griswold

“ But the eyes of the young man were luminous with intelligence and feeling, and his voice, and conversation, and manners, all won upon the lawyer’s regard. Poe told his history, and his ambition, and it was determined that he should not want means for a suitable appearance in society, nor opportunity for a just display of his abilities in literature. Mr. Kennedy accompanied him to a clothing store, and purchased for him a respectable suit, with changes of linen, and sent him to a bath, from which he returned with the suddenly-regained bearing of a gentleman. ”

“ Who freed the winds, and the vast clouds unrolled.
The storms no more the skies invest,
The winds are heard no more;
Low in the chambers of the west,
Whence they arose, they've sunk to rest;
The sunset storm is o'er.
The clouds that were so wildly driven
Across the darkened brow of heaven
Are gone, and Even
Comes in her mild and sober guise,
Her perfumed air, her trembling skies,
And Lama, with her star-gemmed, glorious crown,
From her high throne in heaven, upon the world looks down. ”

“ That as a harp it seems,
Which the light airs wake to music
Like that we hear in dreams.
A common fate is that poor girl's,
which many yet must share,—
In the crowd how little know they
What griefs its members bear! ”

“ In the same year in which Milton wrote his works on divorce, he also produced his remarkable Tractate on Education, in which are embodied all the best ideas of the next two centuries on the subject; and that Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, which in the splendour of its diction and the irresistible force of its reasoning, continues to be without a parallel in the literature of the world. He was the first to assert the unlimited right of discussion, and has left nothing to be said on this question by succeeding ages. “Who knows not,” he exclaims, “that truth is strong! ”

“ Every house has its book-closet, and every town its public library. The universal prevalence of intelligence, and that self-respect which is imparted by the democratic principle, have caused a great increase of writers. Yet, owing to the absence of a just system of copyright, the rewards of literary exertion are so precarious, that but a small number devote to letters their entire attention. A high degree of excellence, especially in poetry, can be attained only by constant and quiet study and cultivation. ”

“ Sir Edgerton Brydges remarks of this proposition, that it is so objectionable as in these days to require no refutation; but in the United States, where the divine right of any man to oppress his fellows is not held, we think differently; and our admiration of Milton suffers no abatement, but rather is greater, for this and other works of like spirit which have been the prime causes of the unjust estimation in which he continues to be held in his own country. ”

“ In the cottage and the hall;
From prison bars how many eyes
Look on life's carnival!
The joys we seek are phantoms
That fade ere closed the hand
In the dark reached forth to grasp them,
But the brain receives their brand. ”

“ The elements of power in all sublime sights and heavenly harmonies should live in the poet's song, to which they can be transferred only by him who possesses the creative faculty. The sense of beauty, next to the miraculous divine suasion, is the means through which the human character is purified and elevated. The creation of beauty, the manifestation of the real by the ideal, "in words that move in a metrical array," is poetry. ”

“ Milton had acted too conspicuous a part to live openly with safety in the capital, and before Charles entered London, therefore, he concealed himself in the house of an acquaintance, where he remained until the passage of the act of oblivion, in the exceptions of which his name was happily omitted, through the intercessions of some of his friends. Soon after returning to society, he was a third time married, in consequence of the neglect and unkindness of his daughters, upon whom he had depended for the management of his domestic affairs. ”

“ Still, though he regarded society as composed altogether of villains, the sharpness of his intellect was not of that kind which enabled him to cope with villainy, while it continually caused him by overshots to fail of the success of honesty. ”

“ Kennedy, Poe was engaged, at a small salary—we believe of $500 a year—to be its editor. He entered upon his duties with letters full of expressions of the warmest gratitude to his friends in Baltimore, who in five or six weeks were astonished to learn that with characteristic recklessness of consequences, he was hurriedly married to a girl as poor as himself. Poe continued in this situation about a year and a half, in which he wrote many brilliant articles, and raised the Messenger to the first rank of literary periodicals. ”

“ Paradise Lost was published in 1667; in 1671 appeared Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes; in 1672 his Artis Logicæ Plenior Institutio; and in 1673 the Treatise on True Religion, Heresy and Schism.
On Sunday, the eighth day of November, 1674, one month before completing his sixty-sixth year, John Milton died.
He was the greatest of all human beings: the noblest and the ennobler of mankind. He has steadily grown in the world’s reverence, and his fame will still increase with the lapse of ages. ”

“ Every genuine author in a greater or less degree leaves in his works, whatever their design, traces of his personal character: elements of his immortal being, in which the individual survives the person. ”

“ It is a gratifying fact that nearly every thing in the poetic manner produced in this country is free from licentiousness, and harmless, if not elevating in its tendencies. Thus far the chief distinguishing characteristic of American poetry is its moral purity. ”

“ The career of no ruler was ever marked by more justice, wisdom, or genuine love of country; and though Milton may have disapproved of some acts of his administration, it was not inconsistent with any of his professions or principles, or with anything that has been said in praise of him, that he continued to be his associate in office and his friend. ”

“ Poe’s works. As a writer of tales it will be admitted generally, that he was scarcely surpassed in ingenuity of construction or effective painting. As a critic, he was more remarkable as a dissector of sentences than as a commenter upon ideas: he was little better than a carping grammarian. As a poet, he will retain a most honorable rank. ”

“ The instruction of Milton was carefully attended to: his private tutor was Thomas Young, a Puritan minister, who remained with him until compelled on account of his religious opinions to leave the kingdom. In 1624, soon after entering upon his sixteenth year, he was sent to Cambridge, where he was committed to the tuition of Mr. Chappell, afterwards a bishop, and the reputed author of The Whole Duty of Man. He had already made astonishing progress in learning. He was familiar with several languages, and with the most abstruse books in philosophy. ”

“ He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed—not shine, not serve—succeed, that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his self-conceit.”
We have suggested the influence of his aims and vicissitudes upon his literature. ”

“ And now we know, O thou our most certain hope and defence, that thine enemies have been consulting all the sorceries of the great whore, and have joined their plots with that sad intellingencing tyrant that mischiefs the world with his mines of Ophir, and lies thirsting to revenge his naval ruins that have larded our seas: but let them all take counsel together, and let it come to nought ”

“ In regard to the number of poems I have given from particular writers, it is proper to remark that considerations unconnected with any estimates of their genius have in some cases guided me. The collected works of several poets have been frequently printed, and are already familiar to nearly every American, while poems of much merit, scattered in magazines and other periodicals, unaccompanied by the names of their authors, are comparatively unknown. ”

“ His great-grandfather, John Poe, married in England, Jane, a daughter of Admiral James McBride, noted in British naval history, and claiming kindred with some of the most illustrious English families. His father and mother,—both of whom were in some way connected with the theater, and lives as precariously as their more gifted and eminent son—died within a few weeks of each other, of consumption, leaving him an orphan, at two years of age. Mr. John Allan, a wealthy gentleman of Richmond, Virginia, took a fancy to him, and persuaded his grandfather to suffer him to adopt him. ”

“ For this purpose the Council of State determined to avail itself of the abilities of its new secretary, who wrote with his customary rapidity the Εικονοκλαστης, one of the most extraordinary of his works, of which his great learning, clear and energetic style and acute and close reasoning, lead the reader’s conviction with his admiration to the end.
Milton had scarcely finished this unanswerable work when he was called upon to do battle for the republican party on a wider field. Thus far his audience had been the English nation; he was now to address the family of civilized mankind. ”

“ Since from my childhood I had been devoted to the more liberal studies, and was always more powerful in my intellect than in my body, avoiding the labours of the camp, in which any robust soldier would have surpassed me, I betook myself to those weapons which I could wield with the most effect ”

“ I have endeavoured to present as much good verse as possible that is new and inaccessible to the reader.
There is in all this nation hardly a native inhabitant of Saxon origin who cannot read and write. ”

“ But under the Protectorate, when this Speech was read by Cromwell, whose genuine greatness triumphed over enslaving precedents, its lofty eloquence and faultless argument induced him to establish by law that perfect freedom of the intellect without which all other liberty is a mockery.
For a while Milton returned to those more elegant pursuits to which he was led by the genial power of nature, and in 1645 brought out a collection of his early poems. ”

“ Mr. Willis observes, that in his opinion, “it is the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country, and is unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent sustaining of imaginative lift.” ”

“ In this he attempts to show that prelacy is incompatible with civil liberty, and to the support of this proposition he brings learning more various and profound, a power of reasoning, and an impassioned eloquence, unprecedented in English controversy. The treatise ends with the following prayer, “piously laying the sad condition of England before the footstool of the Almighty;” than which, as Sir Edgerton Brydges well observes, “there is not a more sublime and patriotic ode in any language.” ”

“ Until the close of the Protectorate, Milton’s leisure hours were principally devoted to the collection of materials for a Latin Thesaurus, the composition of two additional books of his History of England, and the laying of the foundation of his immortal epic poem. In the autumn of the year 1658 Oliver Cromwell died; and the extraordinary conflict of parties which followed, resulted in the restoration of the monarchy. ”

“ In the mornings of winter he was “up and stirring ere the sound of any bell awoke men to labour or devotion; in summer as oft, with the bird that first rouses, to read good authors till the attention was weary or the memory had its fraught;” ”

“ In the interval between the death of the great Englishman and the return of Charles the Second, Milton was not inactive. In the year 1659 he published a Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, showing that it is not lawful for any authority to compel in matters of religion; Considerations touching the likeliest Means to remove Hirelings out of the Church, in which be contended for the voluntary system of supporting religion, which has since so successfully obtained in the United States but which was then everywhere regarded as impracticable or dangerous ”